The present technique relates to an antenna apparatus that may be used as a base station in a wireless network, and to a method of performing spatial nulling within such an antenna apparatus.
A wireless network may be provided to serve a range of different functions, but typically includes a number of base stations, with each base station communicating wirelessly with multiple wireless terminals. For instance, in the example of an access wireless network, the wireless terminals may be items of end user equipment, and each base station may communicate wirelessly with multiple such items of end user equipment. Another example of a wireless network is a wireless backhaul network (also referred to herein as a wireless feeder network), where each wireless terminal (also referred to herein as a feeder terminal) is typically coupled to an access point of an access network, and those wireless terminals then communicate wirelessly with one or more base stations, also referred to herein as feeder base stations. The feeder base stations are then used to connect the wireless backhaul network to a core network.
Within a wireless network, a base station will typically need to use a reception beam that facilitates receiving communication from a number of different wireless terminals. The quality of the link provided between the base station and the various wireless terminals can be affected by a number of factors, one of which is interference occurring from interference sources.
When the interference sources are static, steps may be taken to reconfigure the wireless network such that the effects of the interference source are reduced. This may for example involve determining which base stations particular wireless terminals should communicate with.
However, when the interference sources are more dynamic, for example due to an interference source moving through the geographical area covered by the wireless network, it may not be appropriate to invoke the steps necessary to reconfigure the wireless network, given the transient nature of the interference source. Nevertheless, such transient interference sources can still give rise to significant degradation in the link quality of the wireless links established between a particular base station and a plurality of wireless terminals. This can be particularly problematic for the reception beam utilised at the base station, which may practically have to be a relatively wide beam in order to allow communications to be received from multiple wireless terminals.
It would be desirable to provide an improved mechanism for reducing the effects of interference sources within a wireless network.